1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a report management device, a report management program, and a report management method which manage a report on an industrial product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, ordinary consumers have become more interested in influence on global environments from industrial products. Manufactures are therefore demanded to disclose qualification depending on various environmental labels approved by third party organizations or to disclose environmental assessment information (hereinafter simply referred to as environmental information) concerning individual products. Therefore, at work places of developers of products and in environmental divisions relating to disclosure of environmental information, man-hours spent for demanded environmental work are increasing dramatically. Work concerning such disclosure and environmental work have to be dealt with efficiently.
Meanwhile, manufacturers usually carry out product evaluations for acquiring environmental labels, or prevention of environmental pollution and environmental assessment (such as an initial evaluation hereinafter referred to as an environmental evaluation) for reducing influence on environments in stages of product design/development. Ordinarily, results of conducted environmental evaluations are summarized in environmental evaluation reports which are used for application for issuance of environmental labels or in assessment reports. After such environmental evaluation reports are submitted, the reports are individually managed as documents by use of a document management system or the like. When data written in an environmental evaluation report are required later, a responsible person picks up environmental evaluation reports concerned and subjects the reports to secondary use by processing data forms so as to suit necessary forms or the like.
Jpn. Pat. Appln. Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-208766 (Patent Document 1) discloses an environmental load evaluation system relevant to the invention. This environmental load evaluation system is capable of evaluating environmental load information, covering a situation as follows. For example, the situation is that a plurality of parts actually have respectively variants in environmental load characteristics even though those parts all have one uniform design. In environmental load evaluations, this system enables appropriate handling of parts that have one equal part number and respectively different environmental load characteristics.
However, since lots of people are usually related to products development, pieces of information (backdata) necessary for environmental evaluations are gathered only little by little. Responsible persons charged in environmental evaluations cannot carry out evaluations before all backdata held by individual responsible persons are collected up. In other words, environmental evaluations cannot be started before all backdata are prepared completely. Further, there is a problem that updaters, updated dates, and fixed states of reports are difficult to know because a huge number of persons are related to evaluations.
In the aspect of product management, for example, when a lot of products are handled or when a lot of new models are added, there are omissions when specifying products as targets on which environmental reports are to be created. Such omissions result in further omissions in application forms for environmental labels.
There are cases that one environmental evaluation report is created by a plurality of responsible persons and different responsible persons from those in charge of an ordinary model are in charge of an enhanced model. In such cases, evaluated levels can have variants in environmental evaluation reports (in other words, evaluated levels disagree between environmental evaluation reports). In addition, when evaluation data which once have been used are used later again (for purpose of internal or external information distribution or for making inquiries), necessary information has to be retrieved again from sets of environmental evaluation reports and be processed so as to fit purposes. Therefore, environmental management divisions in charge of information disclosure work further necessitate additional man-hours.
Techniques disclosed in the above publication do not deal with management from view points as described above. Therefore, a report needs to be created for each product or each purpose even though created reports are similar to each other.